Last year was huge for advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. But 2017 may well deliver even more. Here are five key things to look forward to. AlphaGo's historic victory against one of the best Go players of all time, Lee Sedol, was a landmark for the field of AI, and especially for the technique known as deep reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning involves having a machine learn to solve a problem not through programming or explicit examples, but through experimentation combined with positive reinforcement.

Last year was huge for advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The idea has been around for decades, but combining it with large (or deep) neural networks provides the power needed to make it work on really complex problems (like the game of Go). Invented by Ian Goodfellow, now a research scientist at OpenAI, generative adversarial networks, or GANs, are systems consisting of one network that generates new data after learning from a training set, and another that tries to discriminate between real and fake data. The hope is that techniques that have produced spectacular progress in voice and image recognition, among other areas, may also help computers parse and generate language more effectively.

With the immense progress seen in terms of voice and image recognition by AI, one of the next big focuses is language. Researchers are honing on their vision on helping computers generate language with more ease and more efficiency. Full-blown conversations with machines has long been a fascination of humanity, but with all the complexities and subtleties of language, it's going to be a herculean effort. While 2017 will surely see great advancements in this area, for the time being our Siri's and Alexa's won't make for great debate club partners. The new buzz around machine-learning is centered around a technique called generative adversarial networks.

For the majority of people, artificial intelligence won't be here for at least the next decade, despite all the hype. But the truth is it has already become a necessity for many businesses who work with data and it's been widely in use today. While some of us are still trying to figure out the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning, AI is fast progressing. This breakthrough technology has already become accessible for any software developer; tech giants are currently competing to dominate the field of artificial intelligence; China has taken serious steps to become the leader in AI; some jobs might soon be automated, and we've seen some unprecedented advances in deep neural networks. AI is taking the world by storm.

A decade ago, artificial intelligence was something we saw in the movies. Nobody ever imagined AI would become a major part of our lives. Today, there is a huge amount of hype in the world of AI and it is already being seen as a major tool in many fields. Driverless car technology is well advanced and in some countries, notably China, AI research and development is booming. Millions of people use Alexa to turn the lights on or receive targeted online information.